Critical+Analysis+of+As+I+Grew+Older

Maggie Lawler Salamone English 9 Honors **__Lessons Learned__** The poem, “As I Grew Older//”,// by Langston Hughes is about having a dream but never being able to reach it. Hughes is an African American poet who commonly writes about trying to reach one’s dreams. In this particular poem, Hughes is saying that although there may be obstacles that prevent him from reaching his dream, he must persist, get rid of the obstacles, and achieve the dream. In most of Langston Hughes’s poems he addresses the reality of being an African American living in America during the early 1900’s. Being an African American during these times was often hard because there was so much injustice. Dreams were hard to achieve. Hughes writes, “And then the wall rose, /Rose slowly, /Slowly, /Between me and my dream.” which shows how he often had something in his way when he tried to reach his dream. The wall is a metaphor for the darkness that is blocking him from his dream. The lines, “The wall. /Shadow” show that Hughes indeed is saying the wall represents his race. The reader can be sure of the shadow representing his race because he describes the shadow as something that blocks his dream. He shows us that his race blocks his dream in the poem, therefore the connection can be made that the shadow represents his race. Hughes shows us many times in this poem how race has set the narrator back from his dream, but he also shows us his realization about how his race taught him to fight for his dream. The lines, “My dark hands! / Break through the wall!” show us how he has an epiphany. He realizes that his race is the thing setting him back, but because of his race he has to fight harder to reach his dream. He wants happiness, which is show by the lines, “To break the shadow/Into a thousand lights of sun, / Into a thousand whirling dreams/ Of sun!” The sunlight represents happiness because when the word sunlight came up in the poem the mood instantly changed from dark and depressed to bright and happy. In Hughes’s writing he juxtaposes the dark and the light. It is not the notion of being black that represents the dark but the wall, the shadow, and the night that represent the dark. The sun he talks about represents the dream and it is the wall, the shadow and the night that are blocking the sun. Hughes is striving to shatter the darkness in order to reach the sun. The darkness is what keeps making him push forward to achieve the dream, to shatter the darkness and to reach the light. The title of the poem also plays an important role in the poems meaning. The title of the poem is “As I Grew Older”. The title implies that something changed as he got older. Based upon the poem, the title most likely means that he learned about how hard it can be to reach your dreams as he grew older. This helps understand the poem more because throughout the poem he talks about realizing that it can be hard to reach your dreams, but you don’t know if he had an epiphany and realized this or if he slowly learned it throughout his life. Now because of the title we can conclude that he learned about how it is hard to reach your dreams throughout his life and it was not an epiphany. Throughout the poem //As I Grew Older//, Hughes demonstrates the hardships African Americans faced during the early 1900’s in America. Hughes faced many tough times in his life because of his race, but it was his race that taught him he needed to fight for what he wanted. In the poem, “As I Grew Older”, Hughes is saying that although there may be an obstacle to his dream, he has to persist to get rid of that obstacle in order to achieve the dream.